"until" vs "before" or "to"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jul 16, 2007, at 6:16 PM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> Did the announcer say "until" or "till"?  "Till" is more common,
> and the
> standard term in the Midland (and South, I believe).  It goes way
> back,
> noted in early travel journals as of Scotch-Irish origin.

as beverly suggests in a later message, "until" here is probably --
or, at least, probably started as -- a hypercorrection for "till".
there is a widespread (but historically wrong) belief that "till" is
an abbreviated, informal version of "until", which leads some people
to spell it "'til".

as for origins, it's northern british, from scandinavian.  OED:
"Characteristically northern in reference to place or purpose...; in
reference to time, general Engl. from c1300, though now often
superseded by the compound UNTIL."

> As a common daily usage, it
> goes deep: I always tell my students that I, a Northerner born and
> bred,
> will always say "quarter to," but my Indiana/Ohio son will forever say
> "quarter till."

surely some american dialectologist has looked at the regional
distribution.

> The third option is usually "quarter of";

i believe this is general american.  it is definitely *not* british;
when i lived in the u.k. i had to learn, very quickly, not to use
"of" in time expressions, because people were just baffled by it.

the OED gives it as "N.Amer., Sc., and Irish English (north.)" and
glosses it as TO prep. 6b.  that is, the OED takes "to" to be the pan-
english preposition for this use, and "till"/"until" and "of" to be
regional variants.

> I've never heard
> "quarter before" (or 15 minutes before).  This seems to me simply
> dialectal, not semantic.

this use of "before" looks like just the ordinary preposition
"before" 'previous to', as in "before dark/midnight/Easter".  it's
simply the counterpart of "after".  the OED doesn't give it a
subentry and has no examples with hours.

i'd guess that this use of "before" has been innovated many times in
many places, by specialization of general temporal "before" and/or as
a contrast to temporal "after"/"past" (both metaphorized from spatial
to temporal uses, though temporal "past" seems to have been
specialized mostly to uses with hours).  that wouldn't, of course,
preclude its now having a dialectal distribution -- though the
distribution might be complex.

a virtue of "before" here is that it is semantically transparent, in
no way idiomatic, so that it will always work.  in my time in the
u.k., after i realized that my "of" wouldn't fly, i became worried
about my other normal choice, "to", since it also was idiomatic, and
i feared that it might not be general in british english (there's no
way you can tell what people in some social group do *as a whole*;
you can only know what you've experienced), so i mostly opted for
"before", which everyone understood.  (and if people found it a bit
odd, well, i was a yank and often sounded funny to them.)

in any case, most people have two or more of these variants available
to them, so there's a question of how particular people make the
choice between the variants they use.  i have no idea what factors
influence my choice of "to" and "of" (when i'm in the u.s.), but
there's probably something going on there. (alison murie seems to
choose between "to" and "before", and we can ask about the factors
favoring one or the other for her.  other speakers have "to" and
"till" as their principal variants.  there are probably some
americans with "to", "till", and "of", all with a fair frequency, and
others with "to", "before", and "of".  etc.)

since i hold the position that no variation is entirely free -- my
Linguistic Institute course this summer is "Choosing a Variant:
Unfree Variation" -- i expect that careful studies will find contexts
in which the choice of variants makes a difference of some sort.  (my
position is consistent with the choice being essentially random,
though with a general preference for one variant over another, in
many, or even most, contexts.)

i'd guess that there's some literature on these choices in regional
dialects, but probably not in other social dialects, and almost
surely not in individuals.

i've skimmed some of the high-end advice books and find nothing on
these prepositions (though i have to confess that it's hard to know
where to look -- i tried "to", "of", "till", "before", "minutes",
"quarter", and "time expressions").  i didn't find anything in the
big Quirk grammar or in Huddleston & Pullum (again, a proviso about
how hard it is to search).  i'd guess that some of the books meant
for schoolkids are more directive, and there might be something in
the big style manuals (like the Chicago Manual of Style) and in
reference works meant for learners of english as a second language.
(i'm working at home today, away from most of my library, but i'll
check things out tomorrow.  meanwhile it's Waiting for the Repairman,
Or Someone Like Him.)

arnold

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org